An unexpected finding

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As many of you know (because I’ve written about it a few times before) I’m a member of the local ‘toad patrol’ and in spring we help the local toads to avoid being squashed when they cross the busy road from the woods where they spend much of their time, to the ponds where they breed. But where do they spend the rest of the year? This is something we have often wondered since we know that well over a thousand toads live in the woods, and yet no-one ever sees any outside of the breeding season. Of course they are well camouflaged, so they wouldn’t be easy to see even if they were all walking about on the forest paths, but now a new study has cast an intriguing new angle on the question. Researchers checking nestboxes for dormice were surprised to find a toad in one of them. This led to a larger study which revealed an unexpectedly large number of toads in nest boxes, disused bird nests and tree cavities up to three metres above ground! It often seems that the more we know about the natural world, the more there is that we don’t know. All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2022.